ALAVI MOGHADDAM - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
SATOH - Department of Environmental Studies, The University of Tokyo, Japan
MINO - Department of Environmental Studies, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Coarse pore filter can be applied inside the aeration tank to facilitate the separation of sludge from liquid instead of sedimentation. This filter has pores, which are irregular in shape, and the pore size is bigger than those of MF. The objectives of this study were to maintain as much as MLSS in the activated sludge process with coarse pore filter and to investigate the system performance under high MLSS condition. Small-scale reactor results shows good quality of effluent specially during sludge bulking in the system in terms of SS, TOC, DOC and turbidity. The average carbon removal for 62 days operation of this system was about 94 % (based on effluent DOC) and 87% (based on effluent TOC). The average sludge yield in this system is about 0.44 kg MLSS /Kg TOC which is about 0.24 kg MLSS/ kg BOD. This amount is less than those of conventional activated sludge and trickling filter.

Coarse pore filter, activated sludge, filtration bioreactor, sludge yield